Laurence M. Vance

Tuesday March 13, 2018

Although about thirty countries have the death penalty for drug trafficking, only in China, Indonesia, Iran, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, and Vietnam are drug offenders routinely executed. Yet, the worst place to be caught drug trafficking is in the Philippines, where thousands have died in extra-judicial killings.

In the United States, not only can some drug offenses result in life in prison, “the sentence of death can be carried out on a defendant who has been found guilty of manufacturing, importing or distributing a controlled substance if the act was committed as part of a continuing criminal enterprise.”

President Trump has said some outrageous things. He has said some dumb things. And he has said some outrageously dumb things. But talking about the death penalty for drug dealers is one of the most outrageously dumb things he has ever said.read on...

Wednesday October 25, 2017

Our two-party system makes it almost impossible for libertarians to get elected to office, especially on the national level. In order for libertarians to get elected to Congress, their best bet is to run as a Republican. Ron Paul is a perfect example of this. But libertarians should have no illusions about the Republican Party. And they shouldn’t make the Republican Party out to be something it is not.

A former member of the Libertarian Party who is now running for office as a Republican recently said about the Republican Party:

At its core, the Republican Party is supposed to be a liberty party—that’s why it was the party of Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan. For a Republican, so long as you are not violating the lives and liberties of other human beings—and that includes the lives of human beings in the womb—the government should give you the freedom to do as you see fit. The party strives to put the trust and the power back in the hands of the people instead of handing it over to unelected bureaucrats.

This almost makes Republicans sound like libertarians. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Let’s first look at some principles of libertarianism followed by an analysis of the above statement.read on...